Recent growth in demand for broadband wireless services enables rapid deployment of innovative, cost-effective, and interoperable multi-vendor broadband wireless access products, providing alternatives to wireline broadband access for applications such as telephony, personal communications systems (PCS) and high definition television (HDTV). At the same time, broadband wireless access has been extended from fixed to mobile subscriber stations, for example at vehicular speed. Though the demand for these services is growing, the channel bandwidth over which the data may be delivered is limited. Therefore, it is desirable to deliver data at high speeds over this limited bandwidth in an efficient, as well as cost effective, manner.
In the ever-continuing effort to increase data rates and capacity of wireless networks, communication technologies evolve. An encouraging solution for the next generation broadband wireless access delivering high speed data over a channel is by using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). The high-speed data signals are divided into tens or hundreds of lower speed signals that are transmitted in parallel over respective frequencies within a radio frequency (RF) signal that are known as subcarrier frequencies (“subcarriers”). The frequency spectra of the subcarriers may overlap so that the spacing between them is minimized. The subcarriers are also orthogonal to each other so that they are statistically independent and do not create crosstalk or otherwise interfere with each other. When all of the allocated spectrum can be used by all base stations, the channel bandwidth is used much more efficiently than in conventional single carrier transmission schemes such as AM/FM (amplitude or frequency modulation), in which only one signal at a time is sent using only one radio frequency, or frequency division multiplexing (FDM), in which portions of the channel bandwidth are not used so that the subcarrier frequencies are separated and isolated to avoid inter-carrier interference (ICI).
In OFDM, each block of data is converted into parallel form and mapped into each subcarrier as frequency domain symbols. To get time domain signals for transmission, an inverse discrete Fourier transform or its fast version, IFFT, is applied to the symbols. The symbol duration is much longer than the length of the channel impulse response so that inter-symbol interference is avoided by inserting a cyclic prefix for each OFDM symbol. Thus, OFDM is much less susceptible to data loss caused by multipath fading than other known techniques for data transmission. Also, the coding of data onto the OFDM subcarriers takes advantage of frequency diversity to mitigate loss from frequency-selective fading when forward error correction (FEC) is applied.
Another approach to providing more efficient use of the channel bandwidth is to transmit the data using a base station having multiple antennas and then receive the transmitted data using a remote station having multiple receiving antennas, referred to as Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO). The data may be transmitted such that there is spatial diversity between the signals transmitted by the respective antennas, thereby increasing the data capacity by increasing the number of antennas. Alternatively, the data is transmitted such that there is temporal diversity between the signals transmitted by the respective antennas, thereby reducing signal fading.
In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems, multiple users are allowed to transmit simultaneously on the different subcarriers per OFDM symbol. In an OFDMA/TDMA embodiment, for example, the OFDM symbols are allocated by a time division multiplexing access (TDMA) method in the time domain, and the subcarriers within OFDM symbols are divided in frequency domain into subsets of subcarriers, each subset is termed a subchannel.
Information theoretic analysis suggests that additional performance can be extracted in the presence of channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). Closed-loop transmission strategies use, for example, knowledge of the channel at the transmitter to improve link performance, reliability, and range. For a base station with one transmit antenna, channel knowledge provides a means to determine the quality of the channel response across the signal bandwidth for the purpose of selecting the best portion of the band on which to transmit. Channel knowledge may also be used by a base station to transmit data streams to multiple subscriber stations on the same time-frequency resources. In MIMO applications, closed loop transmission methods are much more robust to channels that lack adequate scattering compared with open-loop MIMO methods.
One method of providing channel information to the transmitter is for a subscriber station to measure the downlink (DL) channel and transmitting a feedback message to the base station. The feedback message contains information enabling the base station to perform the closed-loop transmission on the DL. In broadband channels, the amount of feedback information needed can be significant.
On the other hand, channel sounding is a signaling mechanism where a subscriber station transmits channel sounding waveforms on the uplink to enable the base station to determine the base station to subscriber station channel response. Channel sounding assumes the reciprocity of the uplink and downlink channels, which is generally the case in Time Division Duplexing (TDD) systems where the transmit and receive hardware are appropriately calibrated.
Since the frequency bandwidth of the uplink (UL) transmissions encompasses the occupied bandwidth of the downlink transmission, channel sounding leverages uplink data transmissions without additional overhead.
However, since all CSIT capable subscriber stations need to perform channel sounding, a significant overhead is introduced. In broadband wireless networks, where the frequency domain consists of many sub-bands, each sub-band requires a channel feedback. Therefore, requirement for feedback resource, in particular in case of MIMO where feedback is required for example for beam forming, is significant.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide an improved channel sounding design, method and apparatus to an OFDMA system.